Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, a multi-award winning collective of online open-source investigators.

The organisational part of the theory, which we can call knowledge, comes from schemata, a concept adapted from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Schemata are mental frameworks created through interaction with the environment, which are, in turn, used for the interpretation of new interactions. A basic schema of a snail for example might include concepts such as small, slow-moving, spiral-shaped shells, tentacles, slime trails, and, depending on your culinary background, edible.

Just as the digestive processes of the snail allow it to adapt the decaying organic matter that it feeds upon into something it can use, so adaptive processes, which we can call intelligence, are also needed to allow new experiences to be fitted with the pre-existing schemata. Failure to achieve such adaption resulting in an uncomfortable state of disequilibrium.

Piaget proffers two processes for the purpose of achieving this adaptation:

• Assimilation is the process of taking new experience and adapting it to fit into the existing schemata. A giant African snail, for example, may be somewhat different to the garden snails most of us built our snail schema upon, but it can be assimilated with minimal adaptation.
• Accommodation is the process of taking existing schemata and adapting them to new experiences. A slug, for example, is so significantly different from the garden snail upon which our snail schema was built that disequilibrium can only be avoided by creating an entirely new schema for it.

These twin processes are based on our own unique schemata and are thus highly subjective.

In order to avoid the discomfort of disequilibrium and the additional effort of accommodation we tend to prefer experience which assimilates easily into our existing schemata (confirmation bias) and to misinterpret those that do not in such a way that they do. Thus, either way, personal experience is far more likely to reinforce existing beliefs than change them.

Chris Gyford, Cambridge Skeptics

The first such intertitle introduces us to Jay Walker, somewhat miscast as an evil CEO, and his company’s nefarious plan for, “mass delivery of vaccines with microchip technology”. These plot points are later backed up with carefully selected clips of Walker talking about long-term goals first for America and then the world, and of the interviewer promising to keep an eye on his new technology, referring to the pre-filled syringes, not the chips as we are seemingly misled to believe.

These intertitles reach an ominous conclusion with the statement, “Walker says the chip is optional,” which the inverted commas in the title have already prepared us to distrust. The option in question is not, however, if we want to have this chip injected into us, as the re-edit would seemingly have us believe, but rather, as Walker makes clear, whether or not the government wants to pay the additional cost for this fancy stock-control option. Hardly a concern we need inverted commas for.

Ironically, this apparently deliberately misleading re-edit was far from necessary, as a quick scan of the original video’s comment section or even of those debunking the claims, such those by VERIFY and CBN News itself, and show that these misinterpretations were already being made. As Piaget has informed us, the mental frameworks (schemata) and ability to adapt new information (assimilation) into those frameworks needed to mislead us are things we already possess as a simple matter of biology.

Chris Gyford, Cambridge Skeptics